Tuesday, September 12, 2017

PMD and SensibleVision announced a technology partnership to create a modern, mobile 3D facial recognition platform.

“With our leading 3D facial authentication solution, all handset makers can now transform the way people access and interact with their devices – and keep pace with or even move ahead of Apple,” says George Brostoff, co-founder and CEO of SensibleVision. “The quality of the data from the pmd ToF technology is amazing. Combing our 3D recognition with the 3D sensors allows perfect operation in the brightest sunlight and the darkest rooms with amazing speed and accuracy.”

“The combination of all the partner’s skills lead to an astonishing small, robust, fast and effective 3D authentication solution for mobile devices. As Apple seems to predefine the future of innovative authentication solutions, we’re thrilled to enable OEMs with pmd depth sensors and SensibleVision’s 3DVerify solution to a rapid and efficient integration into their devices,” says Bernd Buxbaum, founding CEO of pmdtechnologies.

I work in 3D and wish them the best, but it's not like using my finger to unlock my phone is soooo hard that I will spend a ton extra money for my phone. Face unlock has been on PCs using either 2D or 3D for some time and no one cares.

I was really hoping for something cool/dramatic from Apple to really drive users to want 3D. This isn't it.

here's the problem with this, and it's at least a business model problem, before we even get to the technical problems with ToF in consumer devices (you see today that Apple is using structure light, not ToF in mobile). The problem is that PMD and SV cannot afford to get ahold of enough people to test their solution to the point of convincing a major phone OEM to embed the depth sensor and use the SV software.

Compared to Apple's juggernaut CV team and bottomless cash balance, Apple can outspend PMD/SV by orders of magnitude, and Apple can out resource (engineers, hw, sw, machine learning/training/labeling) PMD/SV by orders of magnitude.

Hence this solution cannot mature because it won't have enough data to learn. PMD/SV futile attempt to ride the Apple momentum on the X intro.

1 I suspect it is mostly relying on 2D as their depth noise can not allow reliable classification.2. TOF is too big and expensive for mobile, Apple chose structure light for a good reason.3. With all of my respect for Apple, face tracking and authentication could be done "good enough" with 2D, the real use for 3D was not yet shown...and it will be volumetric content.

Good 3D would absolutely help improve reliability over 2D. I agree that ToF is too noisy to accomplish that, and in order to remove noise, its frame rate drops to the floor, which makes for latency and motion blur. Not good.

Structured light and stereo are good for this use case and would provide decent quality depth to improve upon 2D face recognition.

PMD won't work well outdoors, however neither will structured light. Wonder how Apple is going to deal with that fault case.

And I have tried face unlock on a Surface Pro using Microsoft's IR 2D solution, and it, well, sucks. It no longer recognizes me... ;(